STORY ARCHIVE

Techno Trash

The techno boom is creating techno trash. Almost a million computers were dumped in landfill in Australia last year. There are 10 million obsolete mobile phones lying around, not to mention printers, photocopiers, scanners fax machines and televisions. They are creating a mountain of waste that we have no way of recycling. Generally that means they are all ending up in land fill.

We investigate the dangers of dumping our techno trash and found a toxic cocktail of heavy metals - arsenic, mercury, cadmium, chromium and zinc - is leaching into the soil creating a potential environmental time bomb. And with an estimated 80% of redundant computers still sitting in people’s back rooms, the problems are going to get a lot worse. Paul Willis asks what’s the scale of the problem, what’s driving it, and what can be done about it?

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: We live in a technological society, we also live in throw away society. As we upgrade to the latest and greatest computer we create an ever increasing mountain of technology trash. The question is, what are we going to do with it all? We threw away more than a million computers last year alone... and most of them ended up in land fill.

Mariann Lloyd-Smith: If we don’t do something about computer waste, we will be going under mountains of computers.

Stewart Fist: The style of life we live these days, is to abandon things that work perfectly well and step up.

Narration: If we do nothing, by 2012, we’ll need a hole the size of 1,700 Olympic swimming pools just to bury our old computers. It’s a potential toxic time-bomb, because computers contain all sorts of chemical nasties.

Mariann Lloyd-Smith: The chemicals that will be released from the computers in landfill are a real bunch of nasty persistent, chemicals. They lodge in the fats of people and wildlife, they can have affects on the developing foetus, they can affect kidney, liver function, they can destroy the central nervous system.

Narration: Computers contain mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chemical fire retardants. Once this toxic cocktail gets into the ground water, it can escape into the environment and cause havoc for decades to come. Mariann Lloyd-Smith believes we’re creating an environmental monster for the future.

Mariann Lloyd-Smith: I think everybody in today’s world must feel a sense of responsibility for the mounting amount of waste that we have got. We have got to do something.

Narration: And we really don’t need to throw them away. Computers can be recycled.

Q: What can be recycled out of an old computer?

Will Le Messurier: Well almost anything, For example a circuit board has gold content in it. It does return a value to us. Plastics are a big problem for us, and it’s a problem around the world. We have plastic contamination in the form of other metals, other plastics and fire-retardants in the plastics.”

Narration: Which makes plastic casings hard, if not impossible, to break down and reuse. But recycling can help to contain the highly toxic chemicals and heavy metals in everything from motherboards to monitors.

Q: So this is where you start pulling apart cathode ray tubes?

Will Le Messurier: Yes, correct. It contains up to 25% lead by weight and that, in an ordinary cathode ray tube, that’s probably minimum 2 kilos of lead in a tube.

Narration: You can also take old, working computers to community groups that re-use them. But why should functioning computers become obsolete as quickly as they do? Technology commentator Stewart Fist says computer companies could be doing more to design machines that last longer. He believes we’re being held hostage to rampant capitalism.

Stewart Fist: Money, I mean that, that’s basically how they make their money. If the majority of users just use a computer as a word processor you wonder why they didn’t stop ten year’s ago because the old word processors are probably every bit as good as the current latest gee whiz versions.

Narration: Hardware manufacturers create ever faster processors. And software developers use up the extra memory as fast as it becomes available.

Stewart Fist: I’m not suggesting collusion where they all meet in a dark room and smoke cigars and discuss how they’re going to do it but they don’t need to. They can all see the advantage of upping the anti and pushing, each stage pushes the other along.

Narration: Will sees the casualties of this constant upgrade drive. He receives products that are obsolete before they’ve even been sold.

Will Le Messurier: Look at this.

Q: What on earth is it?

Will Le Messurier: It’s a laptop docking station and as you can see they’re all brand new. Never been used before and very frustrating to see this happen because I think they should be able to be reused. The problem is that the docking points on the laptop have changed with the design process so each laptop has a different back and it requires a different docking station.

Narration: The major computer manufacturers say they are becoming more eco-friendly.

Richard Lindsay: Computers now are being made smaller, so they're more energy efficient. They're also being made out of simpler plastic, so they're easy to recycle or remanufacture at the end of their life. But importantly now, they're also being made easier to upgrade.

Narration: But Richard’s group only represents the major computer manufacturers. Computer clones represent around 50% of the market and they’re a much bigger environmental problem.

Will Le Messurier: You then have the other clone manufacturers who tend to look the lot, look at the lower cost model and they’re a real problem. They’re very messy to pull apart and they haven’t improved over a number of.

Narration: So what happens to techno-junk that is too costly to recycle here?

Paul Willis: This is actually the cooling system of mainframe computers.

Will Le Messurier: Yes.

Paul Willis: And what can you do with it?”

Will Le Messurier: Not a lot. What we try and do is export this to China where low cost labour will dissemble it and recover the value.

Narration: While Australia has agreed to remove all hazardous waste before sending our junk overseas, other nations are not so scrupulous in using the Third World as a toxic rubbish dump.

Mariann Lloyd-Smith: A number of these countries they have appalling recycling processes, where people sort of literally smash the computers up with no mask, with no protection, and we have not only problems with occupational health, we have major problems with ground water contamination in those areas.

Narration: Globally, pressure is growing on manufacturers to take back old machines, and wear the cost of recycling. In Europe, governments have passed legislation making it compulsory for computer manufacturers to take back computers at the end of their useful lives. The Australian government have made computer take-back voluntary. The industry is designing a take-back scheme, but environmentalists like Mariann worry it won’t be enough.

Mariann Lloyd-Smith: Unless government pass the laws, pass the regulations that say to companies you must, by law, take your product back, it’s a voluntary process, and voluntary processes just don’t work.

Will Le Messurier: In this country governments have shown a degree of reluctance to participate in legislation that prevents the dumping of product.

Paul Willis: They’ve been slack?

Will Le Messurier: Yes, they’ve taken the easy option.

Narration: Dumping computers in landfill is only banned in the ACT. And computers are not our only techno-trash problem. Mobile phones, televisions, video recorders – the list of junked technology seems endless. We need to manage our technology from manufacture to disposal and look at the possibilities of reuse. But, while there’s a simple, cheap and dirty solution available, you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll just leave the toxic time-bomb ticking away.

If you have an old computer and you don’t know what to do with it, check out our website for your nearest computer recycling centre.